One thing that is interesting to me is is that one way of assuring oneself of certainty is to run a physical universe and test a belief or assumption or assumed datum and find it good or bad. Gravity, for example, almost always checks out normally, and it does so for everyone. Not only that, but standard measures will find it accelerating masses at 9.8 m/sec^2 'most everywhere at sea level on this planet, plus or minus a point or two. That makes it a robust conviction, no? Anyone can see it!!
That makes the embrace of that datum no less a belief--simply one that has been tested in a larger matrix of beliefs and found to align and has also found agreement. Try disagreeing with that feature of reality and you fall hard, unless you have become very very enlightened indeed.
But this frame of achieving certainty is not, I believe, the only one. People lear lessons all the time about how to manage things, expect outcomes and find them to occur, in many situations that are far too complex to be tested the way physics is. They abstract probabilities and learn degrees of certainty from their adventures and their successes or mistakes.
BIll is completely right to be skeptical about various assertions in the general class of mystical propositions. The intertwining of the seventeen and eleven goddesses of the Himalyan Bamboo Temple of Clear Skies is likely to be a pretty localized phenomenon, a sort of placebo effect of the spirit. Rituals are usually similarly arbitrary and unfounded.
The question though is whether the baby and the bathwater are being thrown out together, and if so how these may be differentiated.
I look forward to Bill's answer to my last question, though. :D